Every year, Tod Caviness turns a handful of talented, sensitive poets into trained monkeys at the Fringe Poetry Vending Machine. Theatre patrons and random drunks at the Orlando Fringe give them a title and three words. This is what they give back.

Friday, June 12, 2009

Anna, What Fresh Hell Have You Brought Us?

We hated her.Tommy, Corey, and me.Our stomachs sank in unison when we saw her cominga harmonic chord of utter despairplayed in the key of oh-fuck-major.

During recess her obloquies bruised deepraising goose eggs on our soulsthat far outdid what rocks thrown by the boysmade on our foreheads.

“Hey smegmas!” she’d yell to us from the swingset“you’d better come give me a pushor I’ll vomit in your lunch bags!”So we’d go over to herbecause we never got used to the taste of her digested breakfaston our ham and cheese sandwiches.

Once during science class she took my fecund bean sproutwhich I had carefully cultured with aerated earth in a Dixie cupand left the room with it, only to return a few minutes laterwith a perfectly pinched-off turd resting atop the soil.But damn, if I didn’t have the second-largest harvest in class.

In gym she would aim the kickball right at Tommy’s new bracesand broke Corey’s front teeth during a game of tag.In English her colloquy with me consisted primarilyof cleverly crafted insinuations that my balls hadn’t yet droppedand would instead collapse in on themselves to form a vagina.Decades later I finally comprehended what she’d said.

Her laughter was a demon’s backwashburning our throats when we were thirstiestand turning our guts into distilled anticipation.Our breaths caught until the next encounter.Putty in her handsunableand unwillingto resist

--

The Anna in this piece is not the Anna McCambridge of Visual Fringe fame, one of our favoritest and frequentest customers. Not literally, anyway. But she did order this one, and I can definitely see the inspiration. See, Anna's motivations are different from most of the people who come to the booth: she likes to fuck with us. She likes to give us words like "obloquy" and "fecund" and "colloquy" and laugh when we sort through our beer-addled brains for the definitions. (This one was one of about half of the Anna gauntlets that we got all the words right. As we'll see in later posts, that wasn't always the case.)

Curiously, though, Anna's pretty loosey-goosey about titles. This one came from the greeting Paul gave her when she came strolling up with that shit-eating grin of hers.